Reactionaries Marching Forward: On Worldmaking and Its Enemies

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Political philosophers have recently recovered the tradition of “rhetorical redescription”—the art of changing the world by changing the language we use to represent it. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has called this strategy worldmaking. This article elaborates worldmaking as a process of revolutionary change through a close reading of the slavery debates in the antebellum United States. Antislavery abolitionists were paradigmatic worldmakers. But their efforts to redescribe slavery prompted a counterrevolution. In the 1850s a new and final wave of southern proslavery writers, led by George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes, attempted not to refute abolitionist redescriptions but to coopt them. This reactionary strategy, which tries to preserve the material reality of the ancien régime beneath the language of revolution, I call worldsaving. Turning our attention to the worldsavers in moments of revolutionary upheaval can be instructive, for their emergence both confirms the success of worldmaking and threatens its ultimate undoing.